Waba is a small, efficient and reliable Java Virtual Machine ( VM ) aimed at portable devices ( but also runnable on desktop computers ), written by Rick Wild of Wabasoft. The Waba VM is an open source project. Waba is a programming platform for small devices. Waba defines a language, a virtual machine, a class file format and a set of foundation classes. Because of the way Waba was designed, developers can use Java development tools to develop Waba programs. However, Waba is not a derivative of Java and has no connection to Sun Microsystems, the owner of the Java brand and related trademarks. The syntax of the Waba programming language is a strict subset of the syntax of the Java language. This allows developers who are familiar with Java to quickly start programming in Waba. The Waba class file and bytecode format are strict subsets of the class file and bytecode format supported by Java. This allows developers to use Java development tools to write programs for the Waba platform as long as they only use the subset of functionality supported by Waba. Waba was designed for small, usually mobile, devices. Waba virtual machines are available that are under 64K in size ( including foundation classes ) and that run programs in less than 10K of memory. With Waba, you can write one program that can run on a PalmPilot device, Windows CE device or any machine that supports Java ( either the JDK 1.02, 1.1, 1.2 or 2.0 ). The alternative to programming in Waba is to program in a language specific to a given small device. Usually this means writing code in C to a native, non-portable API. These APIs tend to be large, difficult to program and small programming mistakes can mean catastrophic application failure ( small devices normally only contain memory and no outside storage device, so if a program corrupts memory, the whole machine may need to be reset ).

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